Anti-Apartheid Protest at South Africa House, London, 1989
Demonstrators outside the South African embassy on Trafalgar Square in 1989. The non-stop picket there ran for nearly four years; by the time it ended the sanctions campaign it belonged to had made South Africa a country other governments found expensive to defend.
The boycott worked slowly and then all at once. Sporting isolation from the 1960s, an arms embargo in 1977, disinvestment by American and European companies through the 1980s, and finally the refusal of foreign banks to roll over short-term loans in 1985 — which produced a currency crisis the government could not manage. Whether sanctions ended apartheid or merely raised its price is still argued; that they changed the arithmetic is not. See the global sanctions campaign that isolated South Africa.
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